


Angry Merman and The Accidents

by versayce



Series: Barry and Arthur Make Sex and Jokes [1]
Category: Justice League (2017)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 08:04:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12860319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versayce/pseuds/versayce
Summary: “If we had a band,” Barry shouted over the screeching groan of crumpling metal, “the three of us – what do you think it would be called?”Barry, Vic, and Arthur develop a special bond. Barry wishes Arthur would bang him like the proverbial screen door. Vic is a ruthless wingman. Sadly, no one actually forms a band.





	Angry Merman and The Accidents

**Author's Note:**

> I went to watch Justice League because I love Ezra Miller and Jason Momoa, and I walked out - surprise surprise - with an obsessive NEED to consume just the worst type of content about their two characters fucking. Why isn't there more of it??? Please make more of it, and then maybe I, a boor with absolutely no knowledge of DC-anything, won't have to come crashing through your fandom with my half-baked attempts. Sorry!

Things, Barry thought as he peeled strings of thick mutant-squid goo off his suit, sometimes made more sense when you spun them into analogies. If getting up in the morning to fight crime in an awesome costume, for example, was just like any other job, then a rogue marine biologist who got their hands on a gene-reshuffling chemical agent and loosed a horde of enormous cephalopods into the harbour was just another day at the office. Yes, squid were disgusting, and ones the size of a blue whale were downright horrifying, but it was nothing to be hyperventilating about in the relative privacy afforded by a stack of shipping containers.

“Hey man,” Victor yelled at him from somewhere vaguely ‘up’ – probably hovering nearby with his nifty rocket-feet. “You ok?”

“Awesome!” Barry yelled back, taking one last shaky gulp of air. “Perfect! Doing great! Covered in slime and loving every minute of it, cause that’s what we do – get covered in slime for the greater good.”

“You sure?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, inside the stomach of a giant squid isn’t even the weirdest place I ever had a panic attack. This one time my ears started ringing really bad on a school trip to a cattle ranch―”

“Alright, meet you back at the jet, then,” Victor said and flew off, apparently not very interested in learning all the sordid details of the cattle ranch incident.

Barry needed a moment to suppress the traumatic memory of a cow giving birth, then finished scraping out as much of the squid fluids as he could from between the plates and wires of his suit.

It was nice of Vic to check on him. Vic, in general, was nice. They fist-bumped sometimes. To put it into an analogy – weren’t they sort of like brothers now? Having each other’s backs, looking out for one another. You know, brotherly things.

Barry had wanted friends, but the Justice League felt more like a family. Not that he was an expert on families or anything, but it was just an analogy, it didn’t have to fit exactly. There was mom and two dads (a modern, progressive arrangement that challenged the stale two-parent paradigm), a cool uncle with maybe just a tiny drinking problem and a ‘fuck you’ attitude, grandpa back at the Batcave, and the kids – him and Vic. The accidents.

Mom and the dads had their shit together. They made battle plans, kept tabs on any potential threats to planetary security, shorted tech stocks to finance their super-heroing, and generally upheld Truth and Justice wherever they went.

Grandpa remembered all their birthdays and made sure they all remembered to eat. Unlike Bruce, Barry didn't actually need any food-related reminders, but he definitely appreciated how thoughtful it was of Alfred to always stock whatever Wayne pantry happened to be nearby with a dazzling variety of snacks.

The kids, him and Vic, mostly got underfoot, but everyone was real nice and supportive about it.

Then there was Uncle Arthur, which was where the family analogy totally and completely broke down on account of the truly astounding ferocity with which Barry wished that the man would hold him down and fuck him into the ground. Not very familial. Not very easy to make sense of. And certainly not very likely to happen.

And speak of the devil, there he was, watching Barry pat himself down for any last lingering bits of ooze with an easy stone-faced nonchalance that featured heavily in Barry’s late-night masturbatory sessions.

“You coming, kid?” Arthur asked, and Barry choked down an innuendo no one needed to hear. “Or do you wanna stay behind to snuggle up to those squid some more?”

“Nope. I’m good. Got my fill of squid-on-man intimacy. I’m gonna need about a hundred showers to feel clean again, then a hundred more to restore my virtue.”

Arthur laughed, and his smile had the singular effect of making Barry want to smile back.

“Let’s go get you decent again, then,” Arthur said, his voice low and warm, and as he trailed after him back to the jet Barry lamented that not even a hundred thousand showers stood a chance of restoring any portion of his so-called virtue as long as Arthur Curry was around.

***

“What’s got the merman so angry this time?” Vic asked without looking up from the terminal he’d plugged himself into, busy disabling the security system for the weapons vault they were raiding. Not too busy to gossip, though, apparently.

Barry shrugged, then realized Vic had his back to him, and that he should probably turn back around too because it was his job to watch the hallway for guards and not to try to get a look over Vic’s shoulder at the security footage that showed, apparently, Arthur being angry.

“Dunno,” Barry said in lieu of his earlier shrug. “Isn’t he sort of always angry, though? It’s pretty much his default state. In a smoldering, intense kind of way, I mean. Like, Aquaman, ruler of the tempestuous seas, where the clouds part only once in a sturgeon’s lifetime. Wait, is that even a long time? How long do sturgeon live?”

“50 to 60 years,” Vic offered in the tone of voice he used when he was looking something up before saying it.

“Yeah, alright, that fits.”

They fell back into silence while Victor worked, until a tinny mechanical chirp sounded over the speaker embedded in the wall by the security panel.

“We’re a go,” Vic said, and a moment later Bruce acknowledged over the comm. No, wait, Batman acknowledged. When they were working, he was Batman. When Barry was asking him what he wanted on his pizza he was Bruce. It was hard to keep things separate sometimes, not just Bruce and Batman, but Barry Allen and the Flash, too. To remember to keep his secrets.

Secret Number One stormed into the hallway where Vic and Barry were waiting almost as soon as the security system went offline, Wonder Woman and Batman hot on his heels.

“I said to wait for my signal,” Batman rasped in his crime-fighting voice.

“And I said you can go fuck yourself. They have Atlantean weapons in there that don’t belong to them, and I’m going to go get them back.”

“That’s not how this works,” Wonder Woman chimed in, trying to keep Arthur from kicking down the doors to the vault with a friendly hand on his shoulder.

“It’s how I work,” was the reply she got before Arthur shook her hand off, then charged with a growl, tearing through reinforced concrete and three feet of steel.

Everyone stood around watching his rampage with a disapproving sort of silence, which Barry tried desperately to emulate, so as not to let the sudden wash of arousal creep into his face. But come on, a man bringing down a million tons of metal and stone with his powerful thighs was fucking hot. It was so, so fucking hot, but Barry didn’t want anyone knowing just how hot he thought it was, least of all Arthur himself, who was thankfully otherwise occupied with wreaking havoc on the contents of the vault, if his aggravated shouting and all the smashing sounds were anything to go by.

Mom and Dad 1 shared a look. Wonder Woman inclined her head. Batman shook his.

“He’s dangerous,” he told her.

“He just needs time,” she answered.

Then a portion of the ceiling crashed in, conveniently enough over a spot where none of them had been standing, and Dad 2 came floating gracefully down through the resultant hole.

“I thought you were waiting for me to create a distraction once security was disabled, before you came charging in,” Superman said, managing to sound mildly befuddled yet still completely self-possessed all at the same time, as though there’d merely been a mixup with a bus schedule and not, say, a complete breakdown of a carefully planned infiltration into an enemy base.

“So did we,” Batman growled, turning around to face away from the vault, batarang already in hand. The echoes of innumerable running footsteps and shouted commands sounded from somewhere down the hall.

“Well, here they come,” Superman sighed.

A moment later the full force of whatever halfway-decent private security company that had been contracted to guard the place came swarming in, which wasn’t really that much of a big deal, Barry thought, just a little inconvenient, because they had to neutralize them all without, you know, neutralizing them right off the mortal coil.

Nothing too terrible came of this improvised change in their plan, but afterwards The Grownups had a real domestic disturbance about it back at the Hall of Justice, with lots of shouting and throwing of chairs, computer monitors, and storage lockers. Mostly it was Arthur doing the throwing, which everyone absolutely disapproved of, and so Barry had to nod along while they all said things like ‘childish’ and ‘temper’ and ‘structural damage’, while secretly replaying the satisfying flex of Arthur’s arms as he ripped down a wall cabinet and put it through a plate-glass window.

***

Little by little, some force acting upon their dynamic as a team separated them into two more-or-less functional units: Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman on the one hand, and Cyborg, the Flash, and Aquaman on the other.

Outside of work, that was how they spent their time together too. The adults went for long walks where they talked about the future and their respective painful pasts, while the kids hung around headquarters, mostly, watching every ‘stranded on a spaceship’ movie ever made and upgrading systems vital to the Hall’s functioning which definitely didn’t need upgrading.

Arthur, to the best of Barry's knowledge, spent most of his time alone, probably in the ocean, probably shirtless, probably soaking wet and—

Anyway, Arthur spent most of his time alone. At first. But maybe by virtue of plain old prolonged proximity, he began to get caught in the gravitational pull of the sheer amount of weird, incomprehensible fun that Vic and Barry – two weird, incomprehensible people – managed to cook up when left to their own devices.

“What the hell are you two doing in here?” Arthur asked once, standing in the doorway of the training room, watching Barry run circles on the walls while Vic spun around in midair holding the end of the Kevlar cable tied to Barry’s waist.

“Testing the resistance of the walls against extreme centrifugal stress,” Barry said in snatches, a few words at a time, whenever his circuit of the room took him within an earshot of Arthur.

“Why?”

After a moment of concentrated silence, Victor answered, “Why not?”

A few hundred circuits later, which was actually just under half a minute, Arthur leaned against the doorway and said, “Would it make a difference if the room was underwater?” and from there on the three of them became a definite unit, for good or ill. Mostly ill, if Bruce was to be believed.

***

“If we had a band,” Barry shouted over the screeching groan of crumpling metal, “the three of us – what do you think it would be called?”

Aquaman speared a clambering robot through the head, then shouted back, “Probably something like ‘The Shut Up And Fight, Kid’!”

Barry didn't take the dig personally. He and Vic had already catalogued 'deprecating humour' as an essential feature in Arthur's repertoire of friendly gestures. Here, Arthur was making a joke at Barry's expense because he was secure enough in their friendship to let his humour bite. Kind of like how he never missed an opportunity to remind Bruce just how hilarious he found it that he chose to dress as a giant bat on an ongoing basis. But Barry's question still stood.

Crackling across the pitted concrete of an office tower still very much in the early stages of ‘under construction’, Barry swung around behind Cyborg to kick two more spider-looking things off the twenty-somethingth floor. Then he phased back into normal time just as Cyborg laser-beamed the last of the creepy bots out of existence.

“Band name,” Barry repeated. “Just in case we want any alternatives to Arthur’s totally great suggestion, with which there is nothing wrong, but you know, for backup.”

“Well,” Vic said, “we’re The Accidents, right? What’s he?” he asked, inclining his head with mechanical precision to the exact spot where Arthur was standing without even turning around to look.

Barry considered it, studying Arthur with a scrutiny so intense it might have made the man uncomfortable if at that very moment a fresh wave of mechanical spiders hadn’t crawled up from wherever it was they were coming from to distract him. One of the bots had a cute little retractable saw for a hand, which must have been made of some hybrid metal with a villainous portmanteau for a name judging by the ease with which it cut through a nearby steel beam. Before said beam could cream Barry out of existence, Arthur caught it and swung a wide arc with it through the scuttling spiders, shouting and growling and generally being Aquaman.

“Angry,” Barry said after some thought. “I guess mostly he’s angry?”

Victor nodded his agreement. “Angry Merman! Suits him!” He had to shout over the utter pandemonium of recurring electrical explosions. The situation with the spiders was quickly deteriorating.

“Angry Merman and The Accidents!” Barry yelled, loud enough so Arthur would hear too, then went back to decimating their robotic opponents.

***

There might have been alcohol involved, but most of the time where Arthur was involved there was also alcohol involved. Of course, alcohol had no effect on Vic, so he had no excuse for suddenly saying, in the middle of an innocuous Indian takeout dinner, “Let me ask you though, Curry, why _are_ you so angry all the time?”

Barry kicked at his leg from across the couch, but only got a stubbed toe for his troubles. Cyborg’s shins were not to be messed with.

Vic shot Barry a perfect look of feigned innocence. “What? I can’t even eat this greasy garbage, and you want me to just sit here watching you two stuff yourselves instead of trying to make conversation?”

Barry stopped shovelling saag paneer into his mouth. He was a bad friend. A selfish, thoughtless, useless excuse for a human being. To not realize that all this time, whenever they got together to play Netflix Russian Roulette and gorge themselves on the finest fares Uber Eats had to offer, that while he ate and gave like, zero thought to how Vic might feel about it, that—

“Relax, kid, he’s fucking with you,” Arthur muttered, then snatched the container of delicious spinach goo right out of Barry’s hand. “Cyborg doesn’t give a shit about what you put in your mouth.”

In less than a fraction of a second, all the blood in Barry’s body managed to find itself to his face – as soon as the words ‘put in your mouth’ tumbled carelessly from Arthur’s stupid, grease-slick lips. Barry choked a little, suddenly unable to recall how to make his throat and lungs work in tandem, and then a subtle whirr from somewhere to his left made him turn to look at Vic, who was smiling at him in an altogether uncharacteristically shit-eating kind of way.

Oh god. He knew. Somehow, Vic had hacked the very neurons in Barry’s brain and saw the flow of unadulterated Arthur-centric filth firing in an endless repeating pattern across every last one of his synapses whenever he so much as looked at the man. Only no, ok, that probably wasn’t the most likely explanation. It probably had more to do with Barry having the capacity of a particularly dim-witted sunfish when it came to guile—

_(“Hey Vic, what do you figure is the stupidest fish?” Barry had asked, swerving to avoid another cosmically-altered starfish that took a flying leap at his face. He remembered the aquarium being much less stressful._

_After a moment of combing the internet, Vic said, “Apparently ‘the stupidest fish to ever flop uselessly in an aquatic environment’ is the Ocean Sunfish.”_

_“Oh yeah,” Arthur agreed, trying to dislodge the thick buildup of speared starfish that had rendered his trident all but decorative. “Definitely second that one.”)_

—rather than any emergent brain-hacking abilities on Cyborg’s part.

A silence that must have been pretty damn comfortable for everyone but Barry descended on the room. Then Vic said to Arthur, “I have a thought on those anger issues of yours, though. Maybe you’re just not getting laid enough, man. You consider that possibility?”

At that, Barry’s family analogy broke down yet again. He had been so, so woefully wrong; Vic wasn’t like a brother to him at all – he was nothing but a wind-up Judas, the worst kind of traitor imaginable. A blight, an absolute blight on the Justice League name. All traces of misguided filial affection Barry might have been harbouring towards the guy shrivelled up without a trace, to be replaced with a sour panicky feeling.

Arthur, at that very same moment, had the gall to laugh: one of his vigorous, booze-tinged laughs that made him throw his head back and slap whatever surface was nearest with one enormous hand. Barry saw the laugh coming, and managed to shift out of the way so that there would be zero chance the surface being slapped would be his arm, or back, or thigh, or any other part of him Arthur could possibly reach.

When he was done laughing, Arthur said, “Thanks for your concern, but I get laid plenty,” and took a long swig of his beer.

“Not since the League got going,” Vic countered.

“Fuck,” Arthur said, coughing around the beer he’d just choked on. “You keeping track of my mating habits or something?”

“I keep track of everyone’s habits,” Victor said, as though enacting a personal policy of constant surveillance of everyone in the League was completely normal behaviour, and not even a little bit creepy or intrusive.

“Yeah, alright, so maybe it’s been a bit of a dry spell lately with all this superheroing I’ve been doing. What, you have some tips you want to share on how you keep your chrome polished?”

“Nah, that’s not exactly my area of expertise anymore,” Vic said, then stood up from the couch in one fluid motion. “Kind of a sore spot for me these days, actually. Very touchy about it. I’m sure Barry would make a much better partner for commiserating about your sexual deficit.” And with that, he turned around and walked out of the room.

“You two are so fucking weird sometimes,” Arthur said when Vic was gone. “But at least it’s never boring when you’re around.” He finished off his beer in one pull, then turned to Barry and asked, “So what, you having your own trouble with the ladies? ‘Fastest Man Alive’ not doing it for them?”

Without thinking, Barry blurted out, “I don’t like ladies,” then took in the frozen shock on Arthur’s face, let out an undignified little squeak in place of actual words, and vanished in a rush of panicked regret.

***

“Okay, I had some time to think about it,” Barry announced when he walked back into the room, “and I wanna apologize if I made you uncomfortable. Sometimes my mouth says things and then my brain’s like, ‘whoa, what the hell was that, rewind please’, but you can’t really rewind, you know? I mean, yeah, we're living in this enlightened future and all, but I don’t know the first thing about the, uh, cultural milieu in Atlantis, like if you guys are really against same-sex whatever or if you’re cool with it, and I don’t want to come off as some rabid social justice warrior, but―”

“Whoa, slow down, kid. You’ve been gone exactly seven seconds, so before you start with the disclaimers let's make sure we’re on the same page here,” Arthur told him, standing up from where he was sprawled out on a nest of cushions he’d made for himself on the floor. “You saying you’re gay?”

“Uh,” Barry tried, flicking his gaze to a corner of the ceiling he hoped might have some answers for him. Finding nothing of use up there, he finished with, “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, theoretically.”

“Theoretically,” Arthur repeated. “What does that mean? You never fucked a guy? You fucked girls but didn’t like it? You _only_ fucked guys but you’re not ruling out women? Help me out here, will you?”

“I haven’t, uh―”

Barry found, to his deep and eternal mortification, that he couldn’t say the word ‘fuck’ to Arthur’s face. He wasn’t sure that looking away would help make him any braver, so he chose to skip the word in favour of continuing to look at Arthur’s face, since it was very pleasant to look at.

“I never did— I mean, I never did _it_. With anyone. Men, women, Kryptonians, Amazons, Atlanteans or otherwise.”

Arthur came a bit closer, but stayed just out of reach. “How is that even possible?” he asked. “I mean, look at you,” and Barry didn’t care if it was just because there was alcohol involved – the way Arthur said it went right through him in a hot, nervous kind of rush he found instantaneously habit-forming.

“I’m not great with people. Like, awkwardly not great, and I guess that can be off-putting? Bruce says―”

“I don’t give a shit what Bruce says,” Arthur growled, then moved a little closer still. “Listen, I like you, kid, but I hate this conversation, so I’m going for the shortcut: did you tell me you don’t like women cause you need someone to talk to about it, or cause you want me to fuck you?” At the word ‘fuck’ Barry might have let out a distressed little sound. Arthur grabbed his arm to keep him there. “You just wanna talk, that’s fine. It’s fine by me. But I don’t think that’s what you really want. Is it?”

There followed a moment of silence so complete that it made Barry want to crawl out of his skin. Then he said, slowly, “Nope,” trying to sound out the word all in one single register instead of a chorus of dry-throated creaking. He failed.

“Awesome,” said Arthur, then covered Barry’s whole entire body with his own and smashed their mouths together for the best twenty seconds of Barry’s short, unsexy life thus far. If the kiss was anything to go by, there was good reason to believe it would not remain at the top of the list for very much longer, on account of even better, sexier things it portended.

Then Barry’s brain had to go and make him ask, “So wait, does that mean _you’re_ gay? But what about Diana, with the lasso―”

Arthur laughed that unfair brain-scrambling laugh of his, then kicked the coffee table out of the way. It was a contemporary Danish-looking thing, which slid with an unholy grating sound across the poured concrete of the floor until it finally came to a stop at the other end of the room, partially embedded in the drywall. Arthur ruined a whole entire wall, and probably a very expensive coffee table, to save himself a three second detour when he backed up to sink down into the couch, pulling Barry down with him.

“It means,” Arthur said, in answer to a question Barry had very nearly forgotten already, “that I do whatever the fuck I wanna do. And right now, I wanna do you, kid, pretty bad. You have no idea.”

Barry followed the course his own body charted for him and settled on Arthur’s lap, putting them face to face. When Arthur placed a huge hand at the small of his back and hauled him in, his crotch ground into Arthur’s in a way that made his spine arch. Following a tiny yelp of surprise and something that maybe, possibly could have been a moan, Barry said, “Well, now I have _some_ idea.”

The sound that Arthur made at that, low in his throat, became the next thing to take the top spot on the list of Barry’s best life moments, but was quickly overtaken by the sheer delight of being flipped onto his back and pinned down against the buttery leather of the couch with Arthur’s full weight on top of him. Barry couldn’t help it – he let out all the air that was being squeezed out of his lungs anyway as one long, shuddering sigh.

The weight keeping him in place eased up a little, and so did the devouring kisses Arthur had been busy sucking against his throat.

“Shit, did I hurt you?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah―” Barry told him, but it came out sounding sort of like ‘yes please’, and a roll of his hips that rubbed their cocks together through their pants really helped drive the point home, Barry thought.

“Fuck,” Arthur swore, and pawed at Barry until he found one of his wrists, then the other, and pinned them against the armrest above his head with one hand. “You know what you’re asking for?”

In reply, Barry wrapped his legs around Arthur’s waist to pull him closer, straining up against the hold he had on his wrists to kiss him as deep and dirty as he knew how. When Arthur groaned against his mouth, Barry found himself positively overjoyed at the discovery that all those hours upon hours he’d spent refining his porn search parameters were not a complete waste of his formative years after all.

Soon the most obstructive pieces of clothing were removed, and all the places on Barry’s body that begged to be touched were touched – thoroughly, reverently, roughly, with a firm insistence that drew out of him the sort of sounds he’d been so sure no one actually made during sex.

When Arthur got around to pressing the broad pad of his thumb against Barry’s hole, hard, and said, “We need―” he didn’t even have to finish the sentence before Barry was gone, then back again in pretty much a second flat with the crusty old tube of lube he kept in the darkest, most secret-est hiding spot in the room he’d been given.

And then, slowly, maybe a little painfully at first, but with a building enthusiasm that reached euphoric heights he’d only known before when he was going really, really fast – then, finally, Barry got his wish: Arthur held him down and fucked him into the ground. Well, fucked him into a seven thousand dollar couch, but he could be forgiven an analogy in the heat of the moment. Or was that a metaphor?

On his knees, face buried in leather slick with his own sweat, arms twisted behind his back in Arthur’s grip, and Arthur’s cock pounding into him until he felt well and truly fucked all the way up to the tips of his ears, Barry found he didn’t need any help from a literary device to make sense of things.

***

“How about ‘Mama and the Papas’?” Vic offered, zooming down a collapsing tunnel while Barry ran alongside him, trudging in the watery muck. The walls were too slick with grime and ice for Barry to stay above the dirty water level, so he had consigned himself to yet another super long shower in the aftermath of this particular adventure.

“Nah,” Barry said just as the two of them broke out into daylight, Vic grabbing him by the arm to set him down gently at the bottom of the fifty-foot drop. Stamping out raw sewage off his boots, Barry elaborated on his reasoning: “Too derivative.”

A few seconds later, the rest of the Justice League was washed down from the drainage pipe on a wave of summoned water, landing expertly on their feet without the least bit of ruffle in their feathers. All except Batman, whom Superman carried down like a wet kitten he’d fished out of the sewers, which wasn’t all that far from the truth.

“Hm,” Vic tried again. “’Old Man and The Inhuman Three’?”

Barry considered it, then said, “I like it, don’t get me wrong, but it pretty much hinges on the ‘three’ for the Hemingway rhyme, and Arthur’s already taken for our band. You can’t make it work with ‘two’.”

“Guess not,” Vic said with a put-upon sigh. “Back to the drawing board, then.”


End file.
